Theresa Stern: Mess with my face and see it split (1973)

Richard Hell

Tom Verlaine

Theresa Stern was born on October 27, 1949, of a German Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother in Hoboken, N.J., directly across the Hudson from New York City. She still lives there, alone, where all the poems in this book were written over a four month period in the summer and fall of 1971. She has since devoted that of her time not spent in flipping coins to composing a love story, THIN SKIN. It describes the murder, in ten chapters fired by Theresa, of her closest friend.

WANNA GO OUT?
is a question often asked on the streets around the cheaper bars in New York and Hoboken.

First poem in Wanna Go Out?:
STARS I WAS
Stars, why did you describe me?
You could have had a tree for a tattoo.
Why did I have to be these colors?
It's an ulterior motive, this 3-D nothing.
I loved him so much
but I accidentally dropped an electric toothbrush
into my cunt
and fried his johnson.
My box of chocolates start singing "This Is My Father's World" and
I ram a tooth into the baritone nougat.

Last poem in Wanna Go Out?:
YOU STRANGER I'M TIGHT AND JUICY
The stranger and the moon are good buddies.
The stranger is a puddle
and the moon is the moon's reflection in the puddle.
This is as close as we poets can come to life.
I depend upon your mercy as a goose upon a cigar.
Close this book I scream and come look me up so we can fuck as long
as I don't have to talk.
I'm not about to pay any of my debts ever.
Gored by Beethoven, you should know what it's like to be built
inside a little bottle out of wood.
The stranger has a cigar and is observing geese
pass across the moon like an intricate model ship
or symphonic violins, and all I can do is dream of mud, oh mud, mud.
Via
Mary Harron interviews Theresa Stern (Punk #4)

My copy of 'Wanna Go Out?' is autographed by Richard Hell. I really should have taken it down to Hobart when I went to see Television there. I wonder what Tom Verlaine's reaction would have been?